A. J. Jacobs Quotes
I got a sense of the amazingness of ordinary life, and I became aware of the marvel that we're around to begin with. I visited a lot of extreme communities, like the Amish, Hasidic Jews, and serpent-handlers. And I was proud, because I think I'm the first person to ever out-Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. After four hours, he said, "Okay, I have to go."
Quotes to Explore
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Your friends will be as careless with your life as they are with their own.
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You aren't your work, your accomplishments, your possessions, your home, your family... your anything. You're a creation of your Source, dressed in a physical human body intended to experience and enjoy life on Earth.
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If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.
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Film has played such a big part in my life, in my impressions of the United States.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting.
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Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
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Ignorance of the facts of life gave me my beloved son, Dickon, but at what cost to both him and me, I cannot hazard a guess.
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Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
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I get to see life through rose-colored glasses a lot of the time.
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It was a lovely opportunity for the first time in my whole career to stand up and thank people who are really responsible for me getting to realize my dreams.
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Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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I have been blessed with roles that allow me to express something very personal at a specific time in my life. I seek them out; acting is my therapy.
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Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities.
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It's all in how you look at your life, because no one has a wonderful life. But you can make it what you want it to be.
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I gather inspiration from all aspects of my life and things I see: love, heartache, mistakes, hopes, regrets, successes and faith. And it helps to have a wild imagination.
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I was quite satisfied with my creative life. I've always had reinforcement from a small but devoted readership.
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I never had any social life, just played the piano and studied, studied, studied.
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Whenever I think of how much pleasure I have interviewing scientists, I remember that they're having the real fun in actually being able to do the science.
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One woman came up to me at a lecture and observed that I was much fatter than on television; I think I look better onscreen than in real life. It's the lights.
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I feel alive, fit and active. I have no plans for retirement. My only concession to getting a little older is that I like to have a cat-nap in the afternoon. After that, I can push on through anything.
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Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
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I got a sense of the amazingness of ordinary life, and I became aware of the marvel that we're around to begin with. I visited a lot of extreme communities, like the Amish, Hasidic Jews, and serpent-handlers. And I was proud, because I think I'm the first person to ever out-Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. After four hours, he said, "Okay, I have to go."
